The present invention relates to a system for correlating log notes entered on a computer by persons during or subsequent to the recording of transcripts of proceedings. Specifically, the system correlates the notes to a recorded audio transcript to enable rapid and accurate access to specific portions of the transcript identified by the notes.
In conjunction with court proceedings and administrative hearings, it has been customary to provide a written transcript of the proceedings, with the help of a court reporter, for later review and reference. Basically, the proceedings are recorded on a stenographic writing machine, which is similar to a typewriter, but which is used for making a phonetic record of the spoken communications heard by the machine operator (court reporter) during the proceedings. Operators of such machines, such as court reporters, are trained and certified to capture a verbatim record of all testimony made during such court proceedings and administrative hearings.
During the actual hearing process, other persons present at the hearings, such as the judge and the lawyers for both sides, frequently make notes relevant to or corresponding to the testimony or other spoken conversation which takes place during the proceedings. In the past, it was necessary for the judge or the lawyers to correlate those notes with the subsequently produced transcript, requiring a relatively laborious manual search through the transcript to find the desired portions to which the notes were directed.
Recently, many courtrooms have switched to the production of an audio transcript recording of the proceedings. Judges or attorneys desiring a copy of the audio transcript are provided with copies of the recorded audio track, which then can be transcribed into a written transcript at a later date, if necessary. Originally, audio transcript recording systems relied upon magnetic tape as the recording medium. One or more microphones placed at strategic places in the courtroom picked up the voices of the judge, the attorneys and the witnesses. The microphones were connected through a mixer/pre-amplifier, which then fed a magnetic tape recorder for recording one or multiple audio tracks on the magnetic tape. Copies of the tape later were made by playing back the recorded tape and “dubbing” the audio tracks onto a new blank tape.
Various systems for accomplishing magnetic recording have been developed over the years. As with a written transcript of proceedings, however, any notes taken during the proceedings by the judge or the lawyers, for which a review of the actual recorded transcript was desired later, needed to be correlated by actually listening to a prepared reformatted magnetic tape recording of the transcript and then reversing or fast-forwarding to different sections until the desired section was found. Such correlation of notes with the transcript, again, was relatively time consuming and, particularly with respect to magnetic tape recordings, somewhat frustrating. This is true even though magnetic tape recording/playback equipment often includes a tape counter. Such tape counters are notoriously unreliable; so that even if a position were found through an initial correlation with a note, subsequent reliance on the counter to find that same position on a magnetic tape often resulted in a misalignment, which required further adjustment in order to hear the desired portion.
A computerized court reporting system for correlating the real time video/audio recording with the transcription made by the court is disclosed in the U.S. Pat. No. 4,924,387 to Jeppsen. In the system disclosed in the Jeppsen patent, a court reporting system provides simultaneous written and video record under the control of a single court reporter. The keystroke combinations made by the court reporter are recorded phonetically into a memory in the computer, which periodically obtains the current time and date from the system clock operating in conjunction with the video/audio recording to store these periodic time and date signals in conjunction with the keystrokes entered into the system. Thus, the subsequent written record, prepared from the stenographic keystrokes, includes time references which then can be used by persons present in the courtroom, or at some later date to correlate notes with the current time and date signals from the clock. The system, however, does not include a way for other persons to correlate notes with the record.
The U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,280,430 and 5,884,256 to Bennett are directed to a transcription network for use in a courtroom proceeding. The network has linked computer terminals for a court reporter, and for the various attorneys (and the judge) associated with the proceeding. A stenographic court reporter's terminal provides a speech-to-text conversion and communicates the text in real time through the network. This is accomplished through use of a computer aided transcription (CAT) system of the type which currently is in use in many courtrooms. CAT systems do not rely solely upon the paper tape for recording, but also electronically store the keystrokes in a built-in memory, or on a disk. In the system of the Bennett patents, the court reporter terminal provides speech-to-text conversion and communicates the text in real time through the network. Consequently, the text is displayed on the terminals at the different attorney locations, and at the judge, only slightly delayed from the actual speech being heard during the proceedings.
The different attorney interfaces in the Bennett system allow notes made by the attorney to be correlated to the currently displayed text, or to previously recorded text which can be viewed during the proceedings. The notes entered at each attorney's individual terminal are exclusive to that terminal (or to other terminals for attorneys associated with the first terminal). Notes from attorneys for one side, however, are not available to attorneys for the other side, unless specific procedural implementations agreed to by both sides are effected, when specific communication by way of the terminals is desired. In order for this system to work, however, it is necessary that all of the terminals are linked to the stenographic court reporter's terminal as the proceedings take place. The system does provide for marking of specific portions of the record, which is recorded in each computer terminal at times outside of the deposition or court proceedings, by scrolling through the record and marking or making notes appropriate to various questions and answers, as desired. Since the record is stored in the computer terminal, the marking is directly associated with the record; so that correlation with the marking and a record recorded elsewhere is not required.
Another feature of the Bennett patents is to allow the court reporter and attorneys to correlate the translated proceedings to the actual video/audio recording of those same proceedings. The correlation is effected by means of a synchronization scheme, which electronically associates each stenographically recorded question and answer with the actual position on the audio tape. The tape recorder is attached by a communication link to the reporter terminal. When an entire question and answer has been received, the reporter terminal requests and receives a position indication from the tape recorder counter. The marker position is generated by the tape recorder by a tape length counter and its associated circuitry. The reporter terminal then stores and associates each such position indication with the corresponding keystrokes. Afterwards, whenever necessary, the court reporter or attorneys can display the position indicator and locate the desired audio manually. The previously mentioned problems with locating audio on a tape by means of a position indicator continue to exist with this system; although an effort has been made to correlate the written record with the spoken record, simultaneously.
The U.S. Pat. No. 5,280,430 to Woods is directed to a computer aided transcription system which provides individualized electronic marking of stenographic records during the court proceeding. The system of this patent is directed to a stenographic transcriber functioning in conjunction with a CAT system. The court reporter keyboard is linked with the computer and the system also is directly linked to individual terminals for each of the attorneys and other persons, such as the judge, who may desire to mark the subsequently produced transcription record for personal follow up at a later time. The CAT system, operates in conjunction with the court reporter in a conventional manner. Simultaneously, however, whenever any one of the other independent terminals is operated, a reference signal is supplied to the CAT terminal corresponding to the operation of the mark or “flag” produced by the individual operating that terminal. Each of the individual terminals are separately encoded; so that when the written record subsequently is produced, it may be produced without any of the additional references; or individual copies carrying only the references for the particular terminal producing those references is produced. Thus, if there are four different attorney terminals linked to the system during the proceedings, a printed record provided to each of the attorneys uniquely carries his or her marks adjacent the transcript or text; and the marks of the other attorneys do not appear on that copy. Each individualized copy therefore is different from the others. The purpose of this system is to allow attorneys to reference a particular portion of the printed transcript without relying entirely upon hand written notes taken during the proceedings. Hand written notes taken during the proceedings using the Woods system may be subsequently manually correlated with the marks, which are reproduced in the transcription text, alongside that text. Searching for a particular portion of a record employing this technique is an improvement over notes taken without any correlation with the stenographic record. It still is necessary, however, to page through the record to find each of the sequential or corresponding marks for subsequent follow up. The actual text of the note is not displayed alongside the text, but necessarily is a part of some separate record, either in the form of separate note slips or a compilation of a number of individual notes made at some later date.
The system described in the above identified application is an improvement over the various prior art systems described above. In the system of co-pending application Ser. No. 09/346,430, a computer based audio digital transcription system is used to record and copy transcripts of court proceedings and administrative hearings. In the system of this application, the proceedings are specifically identified by a name or location, the date, and a running digitally recorded time corresponding to the various portions of the digital record. The time is continuously displayed, and, in a preferred mode, the clock display in the courtroom is the actual time recorded in conjunction with each segment of the digitally recorded audio proceedings. Consequently, any notes which are made by any of the attorneys, judges or other parties during the proceedings can be immediately correlated in the hand written note with the displayed time. Subsequently, when the recording is played back in the system disclosed in this co-pending application, the specific time may be entered; and the system immediately returns to that moment in the recording for review, as desired. Consequently, by entering the time when the event took place during the actual court proceeding, review instantly can be made without the long rewind or fast-forward procedure required with magnetic tape systems. Since an inaccurate length counter is not utilized, but a pre-recorded time reference to an actual time instead is used, the access to the desired testimony is accurate and immediate. Similarly, when the recorded testimony is transcribed into text form, a time stamp also can be inserted, if desired, alongside the text. Consequently, subsequent reference to a particular portion of transcript text to be made in conjunction with a note made during the proceeding can be rapidly effected by looking at the time written on the note to correlate with that same running time as it is displayed on the margin of the printed text. To access specific audio information, it only is necessary to enter the time of interest in conjunction with the playback of that particular audio record.
It is desirable to provide a system for correlating notes regarding proceedings captured by an audio digital recording system directly to the recorded audio for review purposes, whether the notes are taken during or after the recording of the proceedings.